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“... Does Luther explain Hitler? Oberman, an international Dutchman at home in Tuebingen, asks the question only to toss it aside: the Reformation was not a ‘German tragedy’. Into this English version of Werden und Wertung der Reformation he interpolates an abrupt sentence: ‘The appalling experiences of the Third Reich incline historians to assume that what went wrong with the Reformation was Luther’s sell-out to the princes’ – which supposedly led to a German tendency to give the last word in politics or morals, not to the individual or the Church, but to the collective and the State ...”

“... Reformation, Counter-Reformation, Renaissance, Humanism – we all break up the past into periods and movements convenient for study, yet it is impossible to understand the Europe of the 15th and 16th centuries if such labels are mistaken for realities. The Reformation is an infinitely complex and mysterious affair: unless and until there is agreement over what it was there can be no successful search for its causes ...”

“... like the Devil. The bone of contention was Hebrews 2, 7. Does the Greek and its Hebrew source mean that Christ was made ‘a little lower than the angels’, or was he made ‘for a while, lower than God’? We have learned to live with such uncertainties. Lefèvre had not. He did, however, have the art of slinging at Erasmus precisely the insults which ...”

“... fable of the Woodcutter and the Axe in ways which link the virtue of humility to the Golden Mean. The result is a comic sermon of extraordinary power. Rabelais could read Homer, Plutarch, Ovid, Genesis, the Psalms or the Gospels through the eyes of Lucian and then spin round on his toe and present them to us in a more straightforward way. But not even ...”

“... here we no doubt ask too much of her publisher. One must wonder, however, what urgency denied M.A. Screech the opportunity for a complete revision of his graceful and informative introduction.* Erika Rummel’s book is an account of the background to Erasmus’s great enterprise, of its inception and execution, his sources and authorities, and of the later ...”

“... heavily to his reputation as a salon sceptic from his day to ours. It is the purpose of Professor Screech’s latest book to show that the only thing right about this familiar verdict is that the Moriae Encomium is central to Erasmus’s thought. At the heart of its paradox, however, there is not doubt but ecstatic faith. It has long been realised that the ...”

“... William Tyndale identified him as a permanent dweller in the halfway house, and now even Screech, for all his sympathy for Erasmus’s pioneering humanity, finds him ultimately lacking. In the Praise of Folly and, more unexpectedly, in his annotations to the New Testament, Erasmus taught Christians to laugh, but he did not teach them to laugh at ...”

“... pontificating? These contributors might not stay for an answer – perhaps just as well. Michael Screech, however, offers some clues, pointing out, in his characteristically moving, erudite, but self-effacing study, Montaigne’s great antipathy towards pedantry, blather and bleating. For hard-line deconstructionists ...”

“... even that there could not possibly have been any. For Febvre, Rabelais was an Erasmian. Professor Screech, however, argued in 1959, as he still does, that Rabelais was an ‘evangelical’, sympathetic to Luther as well as to Erasmus. Commentators who are less convinced that there is a serious message hidden in the box disagree just as much about the place of ...”

“... in, discussing Cicero, who was at the time the most admired of prose stylists: as rendered in M.A. Screech’s learned but digestible new translation, Montaigne confesses, ‘to tell the truth boldly (for once we have crossed the boundaries of insolence there is no reining us in) his style of writing seems boring to me.’ Why should French philosophers have a ...”

“... on the transition which Quakers underwent from religious ecstatics (or ‘good madmen’, as M.A. Screech terms such states in Volume One) to humanitarian-asylum keepers. These essays and Anne Digby’s monograph on the Retreat add to our understanding of the development and activities of psychiatric institutions in the 19th century and allow us to see the ...”